Was Mary Reeser a case of human combustion?
On a July morning in 1951 landlord Pansy Carpenter’s doorbell rang and roused her at 8 AM that morning when a delivery man dropped off a telegraph for one of her tenants, 67 year old Mary Reeser. Pansy went to drop the mail off to Mary Reeser at her apartment but found something quite concerning – the door handle to Mary’s apartment was too hot to touch comfortably. Pansy quickly returned to her own apartment and called the police to investigate.
When the police arrived, they found an impossible scene – in the living room of Mary Reeser’s apartment appeared to be Mary herself, only she had been reduced to literal ashes. Her left leg, part of her skull, part of her spine, and the springs of the chair she was apparently sitting in were the only bits that managed to survive whatever terrible fate she had suffered. Strangely, Mary Reeser’s skull was found to be ‘shrunken’ after the fire. This is a far cry from the usual effect fire has – which is that the skull usually swells or even explodes.
Even more astonishingly, there was no fire damage to the rest of the house, despite the fact that a temperature ranging between 2,500 to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit for three to four hours would’ve had to been available to fully cremate a body. While there was smoke damage present, this strangely only affected the upper parts of the apartment walls and damaged the outlets there. The estimated time of the fire was 4:20 AM since an alarm that was plugged into the damaged upper part of the apartment was stopped at this time.
In addition to no fire damage and little smoke damage, there were no witnesses to this powerful fire or the smoke/smell it would’ve created from burning both a body and a chair. The only potential witness is Pansy Carpenter, who reportedly thought she smelled smoke around 5 AM and thought it was from her overheating water pump, which she simply turned off before returning to bed.
At first, the FBI had no idea what to make of the findings. They were so perplexed that they turned to the public for help: “We request any information or theories that could explain how a human body could be so destroyed and the fire confined to such a small area and so little damage done to the structure of the building and the furniture in the room not even scorched or damaged by smoke."
Eventually, despite these inexplicable anomalies in the fire death of Mary Reeser, the FBI ruled that she was a victim of the wick effect: an initial burn broke the skin and allowed melted fat to leak out to the top, seeping into the clothing and acting as fuel, which allowed her to burn to completion. They state that Mary Reeser fell asleep in her chair with a cigarette, which fell onto her acetate-made clothing and engulfed her completely; the fire also managed to destroy the chair even though it was treated with flame-retardant. The FBI explained that the heat from her body would have risen, which is why there was no damage to the lower parts of the wall but was to the upper parts. As a final anomaly, none of the newspaper next to Mary Reeser’s chair caught fire – it was “unscorched and intact”.
A physical anthropology professor by the name of Wilton Krogman disputed these claims, saying it would be impossible to have the necessary heat to reduce a body to ashes (he agreed with funeral home directors that it would have to be around 2,500 – 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit) without other damage to the home. Additionally, he was the one who had pointed out that of the 30 death-from-fire cases he had studied, the skull had never shrunk – it usually exploded or swelled. The case remains unsolved.
